Structures in Virtual Worlds

On to the next presentation: here we're dealing with the development of virtual worlds and the world ordering that is part of this process. Most of these worlds are very sophisticated and involve a kind of 'imagined habitation', which expects certain actions and forms of interaction as well as represents an internal ideology of these worlds.

In particular, of course, 3D virtual worlds involve a particular form of visual representation which include the representation of the self as avatar as well as the representation of fundamental elements (sky, clouds, ground, etc.). She focusses here on the virtual environment of Alphaworld, which enables its participants/inhabitants to place new objects anywhere in the virtual space - this has given rise to the development of a highly developed 3D environment, yet remarkably resembles suburban America.

The use of avatars in this is also interesting - users both are their avatars and direct them - a strange personality split which is common at least in a sub-genre of 3D games. In Alphaworld, at any rate, the conceivable world is the visual world because of the dominance of the visual. But the rules of the visual world are written elsewhere and passed on through rules and protocols. (Indeed, there's a kind of 13 commandments on how to act as a participant in this world.)

The idea behind this space is to explore various forms of internal government, though. (E.g. wild west vs. rigid society.) However, such metaphors are in themselves problematic because they're so much based in real history. And the progressivist pluralism which such ideas suggest is very difficult to set up or sustain in reality.

Does the Internet today rely significantly on questions of representation? Yes, and representation in cyberspace is also a matter of ontology and relations between objects and structures. There is an obvious intersection between visual and political and social representation in artificial worlds - invisibility either means no power (the absence of the lapsed user) or absolute power (the omnipresence of the system's designer).

There are also two kinds of ontology - the programming language (invisible but all-powerful) and the image or tropology of the artificial world, shaped by a common lexicon of available image types. Images are usually based on well-established tropes within society; such tropes are habitual (in a Bourdieu sense) and guarantees a permanence against change. Constructed worlds include a constructed habitus which limits the range of opportunities available in a virtual world.